ArtSeen

With MoMA sporting a forty-year retrospective of Richard Serra, the Whitney Museum’s Summer of Love, and Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum, why, with time-stamped ticket in hand, would an artist want to see a bunch of live frogs and storied fossils housed in a marble mausoleum?

ArtSeen

The slogan of Toronto’s LuminaTO arts festival is “see the world in a new light.” However, its organizers make no apologies about the fact that LuminaTO is very much about seeing the city of Toronto in a new lightas an emerging cultural Mecca.

ArtSeen

Last summer I introduced my one-year-old daughter to a new bin of art supplies and, within minutes, she was putting out a steady stream of fantastic assemblages, which I immediately pinned up around the room.

ArtSeen

Local motorist performs death-defying jump through ring of fire and is abducted by mysterious UFO, full details at eleven. This is the king of breathless tease that baits us into tuning in for the news, or turning to the next page of those supermarket tabloids.

ArtSeen

ArtSeen

This is some strange, gutbucket picture making. Like an electric guitar, sounding tinny and raw without amplification, or the taste of a stone after days without water, Don Van Vliets uncouth, dry pictures claw their way out at us.

ArtSeen

Trying to make Don Van Vliet the painter and Captain Beefheart the musician and songwriter, not to mention Don Van Vliet the poet, fit under one umbrella, is like trying to climb Mount Tamalpais backwards. One can do it, but what’s the point?

ArtSeen

Since 1980 Stuart Arends has been using a box as both a support and a surface. In 1985, he began working on a small cube that extended out from the wall. While he painted all six sides, the emphasis was on the three most visible.

ArtSeen

From Berlin to Broadway is the Kurt Weill-inspired title of an installation of 43 early-twentieth-century German and Austrian works on paper that the Morgan Library & Museum received in 2005 as a bequest from Broadway lyricist Fred Ebb (19282004).

ArtSeen

“Face melting” does not do Realicide justice. It’s more akin to skull melting and face imploding. The visceral quality of their primordial screams was buoyed and punctuated by the distressed noise and tornado thuds issuing from an expertly flitted mixer: the umbra of the curled fist.